When Snoop Dogg received his long overdue star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the rapper thanked the one person he couldn’t have done it without.
“I want to thank me for believing in me,” he began. “I want to thank me for doing all this hard work, I want to thank me for having no days off, I want to thank me for never quitting, I want to thank me for always being a giver and trying to give more than I receive.”
“I want to thank me for trying to do more rights than wrong, I want to thank me for just being me at all times,” he continued. “Snoop Dogg, you a bad motherf—.”
Before the awards ceremony, the rapper also dispensed some simple advice to those looking to recreate his hard won success.
“You gotta’ put that work in,” he told Variety. “It’s not like they just gave this to me.”
Snoop’s rocky road to success and reinvention is well documented. But he’s definitely made it — not only as one of the OGs of the West Coast gangsta rap era of the 90s, but also as a family man co-starring in a reality show with Martha Stewart in an entertainment industry, which was once reluctant to fully accept him as a convicted felon.
“I had to prove them wrong and do all the right things to get myself in favor. When you mess up, you look for redemption and when you do something wrong, you try to get it right. That’s where I am right now,” he declared.
Although he was quick to thank himself, Snoop also gave credit where credit was due — noting that he learned a lot from frequent collaborator, Dr. Dre. “Dre taught me so much,” he said of his close friend.
Snoop also revealed The D.O.C. taught him how to write the rhymes that would make him a household name. “The last time I went to Dallas, he came to my performance and hugged me after the show and said ‘I’m so proud of you cuz,’” he recalled of the Texas-based rapper.
“That’s the ultimate feeling: When your coach can be impressed that you became a great player and it’s all because of him,” Snoop added.
He also revealed that he got into acting at the insistence of the late Tupac Shakur who told him, “N—a you need to be acting, you’re a star.”
“That’s the kind of person he was. He’d push s–t on you,” he said about his late friend, who died in 1996.
And when speculating about whether or not the Academy will finally give him a Grammy for his most recent album, Snoop Dog Presents: Bible of Love, his first No. 1 album on the Gospel charts, Snoop kept it all the real.
“I’ve got 18 nominations and not one f—ing Grammy,” he said. “If I get 20 nominations without a win, I’m going to make myself a Grammy and have people come over and ash in that s–t.”
West Coast for life.
